Posts tagged with: drupal

I received a number of very interesting job offers when I began searching for something new last month, but there was one company that stood out, and that is Talis. Not only do I know many people there already, I also find Talis' new strategic focus and products very promising. In addition, they know and use some of my tools already, and I've successfully worked on Talis projects with Leigh and Keith before. The job interview almost felt like coming home (and the new office is just great).

So I'm very happy to say that I'm going to become part of the Kasabi data marketplace team in September where I'll help create and drupalise data management and data market tools.

I will have to get up to speed with a lot of new things, and the legal and travel costs overhead for Talis is significant, so I hope I can turn this into a smart investment for them as quickly as possible. I'll even rename my blog if necessary... ;-) For those wondering about the future of my other projects, I'll write about them in a separate post soon.

ARC is already used by several modules that help turn Drupal into an RDF-powered CMS, for example the RDF API, the SPARQL extension, or the Calais module. The new license will make it easier for the Drupal community to directly bundle ARC with their RDF extensions. I guess that Drupal will have its own complete RDF toolkit one day, but it's great to see ARC being utilized for accelerating the development progress.

A spontaneous invitation to DrupalCon got me driving to Brussels yesterday to finally meet the CivicActions folks I've been working for during the last months. Unfortunately, I missed Jonathan Hendler's NINA presentation about adding ARC's SPARQL API to Drupal for building a faceted browser, but we chatted quite a bit about it after lunch. I still have to learn a lot about Drupal, but one of the really interesting things is that it provides an extension called Content Construction Kit (CCK) that simplifies defining flexible forms and their elements. Drupal generates an HTML page for every resource ("node" in Drupal-speak) created via CCK. The thing that's missing is mapping the structured CCK nodes to RDF to enable optimized SPARQL querying while keeping editing simple and integrated. We discussed the potential of not only ex- but also importing RDF data into CCK. And how cool it could be to directly convert RDFS/OWL to CCK field definitions. Good news is that there are several hooks to RDF-enhance Drupal without running into synchronization issues or forcing the replacement of built-in components.

CivicActions was a gold sponsor and Dan Robinson introduced me to some of the core Drupal developers. And as it turned out, some of them are already thinking about direct RDF support for Drupal (partly triggered by TimBL using Drupal for blogging, partly because Drupal's internal structure isn't really far away from a graph-based model). I'm aware of three efforts now to add RDF to Drupal in some way, there may be more.

But it's not only the Drupal crowd which is looking at SemWeb technology. At lunch, I met Johan Janssens, lead developer of the Mambo spin-off Joomla!, who told me about a SemWeb project proposal for their 2006 Google Summer of Code. (There is another one in the ideas section.) The project took more than just this summer (welcome to RDF development ;), and the outcome is not going to be added to Joomla! anytime soon, but obviously the PHP community is getting aware of RDF's potential benefits and is starting to play with RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. And it's approaching the SemWeb from a practical point of view which just can't be bad.